He rocked his body out of its path, heard the general’s sword strike the road.

Arin shoved himself to his feet.

The emperor lowered back into his seat. Kestrel stared at his winning hand, light-headed with fear.

“Does the sight of this trouble you?” Her dagger still in one hand, the emperor turned his tiles facedown. Then he paused, frowning at their backs. He touched one of the two shiny ones, then flipped Kestrel’s hand over, studying her tiles’ backs. He found, in the boneyard, the two remaining marked tiles. “What is this?”

She made an involuntary sound.

He batted the air as if at an invisible insect. Colored light beamed into the room. The four tiles shone clearly.

“You cheated?” he muttered. “How could you cheat and still lose?”

Arin swung at the general, who cut the blow wide, deflecting it easily, holding it in a semi-bind that forced Arin’s sword low. Arin’s guard was open. The general was quick, his parry swift. The man’s steel was so sharp that Arin didn’t feel, at first, when it cut him.

The emperor licked his dry lips. He turned over the two marked tiles in the boneyard. A wolf. A snake. “These are good tiles. Why would you mark tiles and not take them for yourself?” He swallowed. The knot of cartilage in his throat bobbed.

Kestrel saw him begin to understand.

His body began to understand, too.

He lunged for her.

The sword nicked the side of Arin’s neck just below the ear. It would have taken off his head if he hadn’t recoiled in time.

Arin had been looking at the general’s face without really seeing it. He saw it now. He saw that the man knew exactly who he was, and that he longed for Arin’s death almost as much as Arin longed for his.

The emperor knocked over the wine. He seized up against the table, hand clamped around Kestrel’s dagger.

She stepped back from the table as he shuddered against it. She felt a relief so deep that it didn’t even feel like relief. It plunged straight into exhaustion.

“I lied,” Kestrel told him.

The emperor tried to push himself upright. She thought he might be trying to do something with the dagger, but his arm had gone rigid. It thumped into the spilled red wine.

“I lied when I said I hadn’t come to murder you.”

His eyes were wide, stark.

“It never mattered whether I won or lost the game,” Kestrel said. “Only how long the poison would take to kill you. It comes from a tiny eastern worm. In its purest form, the poison is clear. It dries to a shine. I painted it onto four Bite and Sting tiles. You touched them.”

Foam dribbled from his locked mouth.

His breath rasped. It became glottal, the sound of bubbles popping.

Then it ended.

Arin struck back.

As they fought, viciously silent words thudded in his blood: Mother, father, sister. Kestrel.

Arin didn’t care that the blows his sword hammered against the man’s metal body were useless, that there was no art to this, that nothing would pierce the armor, that a few smashed buckles where the general’s armor joined was no victory. He could see too little of the man’s flesh, couldn’t reach it, and he desperately wanted to make him bleed. If he couldn’t carve into the general, Arin would bludgeon him. He’d beat until something broke.

The buckles, death said.

Arin shifted the path of his sword in midswipe and curved it down toward the elbow of the general’s sword arm, aiming right for where the broken buckles of the general’s arm guard flapped loose.

Arin sheered the man’s arm off at the elbow.

Blood pumped onto Arin. If the general made a sound, Arin didn’t hear it. He was warm and wet.

The general fell. He lay blinking up at the sun, at Arin, his eyes glazed, mouth moving as if speaking, but Arin heard nothing.

For a moment, Arin faltered.

But there was nothing of her in this man, this enemy at his feet. Arin drew back his sword—more power than necessary for the death blow. He wanted to pour himself into this act.

Vengeance: wine-dark, thick. It flooded Arin’s lungs.

Those light brown eyes, on him.

There was that.

That one thing that Kestrel shared with her father.

Arin heard himself speak. His voice sounded far away, as if some part of him had left this road and was as high as the sun, looking down on the half that he had left on earth.

He said, “Kestrel asked me to do this.”

For she had.

Arin was a boy, a slave, a grown man, free. He was all of this at once . . . and something else, too. He realized it only now, as he plunged his sword down toward the general’s throat.